Can you name a story that is interesting reading in English and was translated from Korean?

[Boojatta]

Also, please name the translator of a good English translation. Sometimes there are significant differences in the quality of different English translations of the same story.

Of course, the question has no objectively correct answer. The answer depends on what kind of reading interests you, but a bit of subjectivity is okay.

I can give examples of some answers to a different question: English translations of stories originally written in some language other than English.

Examples

The Danish language:
The Emperor's New Clothes, by Hans Christian Andersen

The German language:
The Metamorphosis, by Franz Kafka

The Russian language:
Notes from the Underground, by Dostoyevsky

The Spanish language:
Don Quixote, by Cervantes

However, I can't think of any answer for the question that I have asked, in other words an answer for the Korean language. I presume that the problem here isn't difficulty accessing my own memory, but simply ignorance: I don't know anything about Korean literature.

However, the appendix of a book that I was recently reading indicates that the Korean language is one of the top fifteen languages of the world in terms of number of speakers. Also, my impression is that although North Koreans have a full-time job simply trying to survive under tyranny, South Koreans have enough freedom and wealth that they can write. So I ask: what are some stories that have been written in the Korean language and translated into English and that are, in your opinion, worth reading?

[Botany]

1. a few

Seoul on Ice

The Kim Chee Also Rises

The Seven Year Inch'on

Sorry .... I am a jerk.

[Orrex]

2. That's a terrific question, and alas I have no answer.

As far as I know, I've never read anything translated from Korean.

[HamdenRice]

3. OK, I'm going to tell you something mind-blowing about Asian languages and literature

At various times, I have studied East Asian history and Chinese and Japanese legal history, so I had to learn a bit about how western ideas got into Asia, especially into China.

So I was reading this book about how China developed a modern legal system around the turn of the century (1900), and that they basically took Japanese law, which was based on the German civil code, which in turn was a modern version of the Napoleonic Code. The Japanese were much more open to the west than the Chinese at first, so most western ideas came into China via Japan.

All that aside, the writer made a throwaway comment that Chinese reformers were able to read Japanese because it was written in classical Chinese characters.

Because Chinese writing is based on characters that represent things and concepts and is not phonetic, the Chinese could read Japanese and the Japanese could read Chinese, even though they could not speak each other's languages, and their languages were not related. Same was true of Korean.

In other words, when you read the word, "house" you see a set of symbols that represent the sounds that go into the English word for a house. You must know the spoken word, "house" in order to read the written word, "house."

But if we are working with a language where the written word, "house" is a picture of a house, it doesn't matter what the spoken word sounds like. Anyone who can recognize a picture of a house can read the word for house.

That means that even though Japanese, Chinese and Korean are not mutually intelligible, they could read each other's literature.

So my guess is that for most of its history, because its neighbors were so big and influential and produced so much literature, and it was so often oppressed and colonized, Korean literature is basically Chinese and Japanese literature.

China, Japan and Korea each adopted reformed versions of characters early in the 1900s, with Japan and Korea creating very simplified versions, so after that, the written languages ceased being mutually intelligible, and Korea developed its own literature.

[Lydia Leftcoast]

5. As one who knows Japanese and has studied some Chinese, I can say that

that is not quite true.

Chinese is written entirely in characters, and that works because it has no inflections (verb endings, etc.)

Japanese and Korean have a ton of verb endings and other grammatical markers, so they evolved a system by which they use Chinese characters for the roots of the words and their own phonetic systems for the grammatical markers and for words that aren't covered by a Chinese character. The Japanese system is syllabic, and there are two syllabaries, hiragana for native Japanese words and katakana for foreign words. Korean has an alphabetic system called hangul, but the letters are arranged in blocks to look like Chinese characters.

In pre-modern times, every educated person learned classical Chinese. As a result, Chinese served as a kind of "Latin" for both Japanese and Korean.

In modern times, the written languages have really diverged.

Only Taiwan, South Korea, and a few expatriate communities still use traditional Chinese characters.

The People's Republic adopted a set of simplified characters in the 1950s, although not all characters have been simplified.

Japan also adopted some simplified characters after World War II, but not as many as China did, and often not the same simplifications of the same character.

North Korea eliminated Chinese characters almost immediately to promote literacy. South Korea has, for all practical purposes, phased them out over the past thirty or forty years.

Japan retains the use of Chinese characters for roots of words, proper names, and whatever else they feel like.

To someone like me who reads Japanese well, written Chinese can look like a random list of words. I can usually tell what the text is about, but not necessarily the details.

Written Korean is completely unintelligible to any Japanese or Chinese person who has not studied it, now that both Koreas have dropped the use of Chinese characters.

I wish I could suggest some Korean literature, but I lost my anthology of it somewhere during my many moves around the country. Two good recent Japanese novels that have been translated into English, though, are Out by Natsuo Kirino and All She Was Worth by Miyuki Miyabe.

[Boojatta]

6. Thank you for the suggestion.

"Two good recent Japanese novels that have been translated into English, though, are Out by Natsuo Kirino and All She Was Worth by Miyuki Miyabe."

Perhaps you could comment on the quality of those translations from your bilingual position? I presume that the Japanese originals are at least a bit better than the English translations. If not, then perhaps the traditional study, in English language education systems, of the Latin and ancient Greek languages along with literature in the original Latin and ancient Greek languages was motivated simply by a scarcity of English translations of the originals.

[Lydia Leftcoast]

7. I judge the quality of a translation by whether I can tell that it was

originally written in Japanese.

A good translation maintains a delicate balance between sounding as if it were written by an English-speaker and maintaining some of the flavor of the original.

I have not read either of these novels in the original (I buy Japanese books only when I'm in Japan), but both of these are good translations.

Out is about women factory workers who conspire to cover up a murder.

All She Was Worth is about a young woman who disappears and her fiancé's attempts to find her.

[HamdenRice]

4. That said, here's "Shower" by Hwang Sun-Won

http://hompi.sogang.ac.kr/anthony/Shower.htm

One of Korea's most famous short stories.

[Boojatta]

8. Kick